For Blood Bankers, a Deadly ‘Drought’ : Whenever a patient dies, The Question follows Janet Barker home: Would the patient be alive if there had been a supply on hand?
For blood bankers, the beginning of the year is when blood levels are at their absolute lowest. During the holiday season, shopping excursions use up everyone’s free time, many business offices close for one or two weeks, people take vacations, they come down with colds or the flu. All of these reasons for not donating blood contribute to a blood banker’s nightmare: not enough blood to go around.
I have worked at two different hospitals as a blood banker and have spent countless days in a sheer panic because our blood bank refrigerators were empty or close to it. We would repeatedly call our local supplier--the American Red Cross--to beg, plead . . . anything to get a few more units. Unfortunately, when the Red Cross is short of blood, so is all of Los Angeles, as well as the whole country.
If we blood bankers were lucky, we would be given one or two units after such a distress call. If we were blessed, we might get five or six. Our only hope was that enough volunteers were donating blood that day to get us through the next. Sometimes that was the case and sometimes not. We never knew what would happen. For me, blood banking was a religious experience considering all the praying for blood that I did.
People bleed for all sorts of reasons: traffic accidents, surgery (planned or unplanned), chronic illness, bleeding ulcers, victims of crime. I have cross-matched blood for all these people. Sometimes they don’t make it despite the valiant efforts by their doctors and the rest of the health care team caring for them. When this happens, I grieve for these people I’ve never met. They are someone’s mother or son or significant other.
The first time I experienced a loss like this was when a 62-year-old woman was badly injured in a car accident. She was rushed to surgery, where the doctors worked on her for several hours to try to save her life. I worked frantically to make sure enough cross-matched blood and blood components were available, which at times was difficult because the surgeons usually wanted it five minutes before they actually ordered it.
I stayed working the blood bank long after I was supposed to have gone home. I felt I couldn’t leave my patient, even though there was someone from the next shift to take over for me. I felt connected with this woman I didn’t know; I was fighting to help save her life. When surgery called to say she had died, I felt like cold water had been thrown in my face. I finished my paperwork, cleaned up my workstation, and went home. I lay quietly on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and then I started to cry. It took me a long time to go to sleep that night.
The next day it was back to work, trying to make a difference for someone else. A scenario like this always drained me emotionally, but trying to save someone without enough blood on hand was even more traumatic. On a few occasions, a patient was delayed in receiving blood due to the fact that it needed to be transported from some other part of the city. When the patient died, I never knew if it was because of this delay or from other pre-existing conditions. No one ever wants to lose a patient this way.
Currently, I recruit volunteers to donate blood and blood products that supplement the blood we receive from the Red Cross. Most of the volunteers I recruit are Good Samaritan Hospital employees, but we are constantly trying to recruit more donors from the surrounding community.
One of the jobs I do as a donor recruiter is to assist people awaiting surgery in coordinating friends and family members as potential donors. I answer questions they may have about donor eligibility, shelf-life of various blood products, timing in relation to the surgery date, as well as give assurances and emotional support. When the time for surgery arrives, I usually visit the waiting room to seek out their friends and family just to say “hi.” They really appreciate seeing a familiar face at this point. This is when I feel very rewarded in my job.
People who can’t motivate themselves to donate blood for general use can still help by donating blood for themselves (autologous), or specifically for someone else (designated). For more information, call (213) 977-4080.
